Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is a woman whose control of words stuns me into silence. Her poems strike a balance between availability and timelessness that is difficult to find in the convoluted verse of most living poets worth mentioning. A particular poem, Rage, about a man and his daughter whom he has molested, has taken an important place in the library of my mind. It is an unforgettable portrayal of the inner workings of two people forever sullied by an unforgettable treason upon morality. It is a simple reminder when post-modernism tries to separate action from consequence by trying to hoodwink morality with a romanticized preference for 'relativism'.

Rage
- 1986

          You are the dark song
          of the morning;
          serious and slow,
          you shave, you dress,
          you descend the stairs
          in your public clothes
          and drive away, you become
          the wise and powerful one
          who makes all the days
          possible in the world.
          But you were also the red song
          in the night,
          stumbling through the house
          to the child's bed,
          to the damp rose of her body,
          leaving your bitter taste.
          And forever those nights snarl
          the delicate machinery of the days.
          When the child's mother smiles
          you see on her cheekbones
          a truth you will never confess;
          and you see how the child grows--
          timidly, crouching in corners.
          Sometimes in the wide night
          you hear the most mournful cry,
          a ravished and terrible moment.
          In your dreams she's a tree
          that will never come to leaf--
          in your dreams she's a watch
          you dropped on the dark stones
          till no one could gather the fragments--
          in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
          and dreams do not lie.

Mary Oliver